Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (2341 page)

Upon Dickens’s arrival in London the second series of his readings was brought to a close; and opportunity may be taken, before describing the third, to speak of the manuscript volume found among his papers, containing Memoranda for use in his writings.

CHAPTER XII.

HINTS FOR BOOKS WRITTEN AND UNWRITTEN.

1855-1865.

Book of MS. Memoranda — Home of the Barnacles — Original of Mrs. Clennam — River and Ferryman — Notions for
Little Dorrit
— Original of
Hunted Down
— Titles for
Tale of Two Cities
— Hints for
Mutual Friend
— Reprobate’s Notion of Duty — Proposed Opening for a Story — England first seen by an Englishman — Touching Fancy — Story from State Trials — Sentimentalist and her Fate — Female Groups — Children Farming — Subjects for Description — Fancies not worked upon — Available Names — Mr. Brobity’s Snuff-box.

Dickens began the Book of Memoranda for possible use in his work, to which occasional reference has been made, in January 1855, six months before the first page of
Little Dorrit
was written; and I find no allusion leading me to suppose, except in one very doubtful instance, that he had made addition to its entries, or been in the habit of resorting to them, after the date of
Our Mutual Friend
. It seems to comprise that interval of ten years in his life.

In it were put down any hints or suggestions that occurred to him. A mere piece of imagery or fancy, it might be at one time; at another the outline of a subject or a character; then a bit of description or dialogue; no order or sequence being observed in any. Titles for stories were set down too, and groups of names for the actors in them; not the least curious of the memoranda belonging to this class. More rarely, entry is made of some oddity of speech; and he has thus preserved in it,
verbatim et literatim
, what he declared to have been as startling a message as he ever received. A confidential servant at Tavistock House, having conferred on some proposed changes in his bed-room with the party that was to do the work, delivered this ultimatum to her master. “The gas-fitter says, sir, that he can’t alter the fitting of your gas in your bed-room without taking up almost the ole of your bed-room floor, and pulling your room to pieces. He says, of course you can have it done if you wish, and he’ll do it for you and make a good job of it, but he would have to destroy your room first, and go entirely under the jistes.”

It is very interesting in this book, last legacy as it is of the literary remains of such a writer, to compare the way in which fancies were worked out with their beginnings entered in its pages. Those therefore will first be taken that in some form or other appeared afterwards in his writings, with such reference to the latter as may enable the reader to make comparison for himself.

“Our House. Whatever it is, it is in a first-rate situation, and a fashionable neighbourhood. (Auctioneer called it ‘a gentlemanly residence.’) A series of little closets squeezed up into the corner of a dark street — but a Duke’s Mansion round the corner. The whole house just large enough to hold a vile smell. The air breathed in it, at the best of times, a kind of Distillation of Mews.” He made it the home of the Barnacles in
Little Dorrit
.

What originally he meant to express by Mrs. Clennam in the same story has narrower limits, and a character less repellent, in the Memoranda than it assumed in the book. “Bed-ridden (or room-ridden) twenty — five-and-twenty — years; any length of time. As to most things, kept at a standstill all the while. Thinking of altered streets as the old streets — changed things as the unchanged things — the youth or girl I quarrelled with all those years ago, as the same youth or girl now. Brought out of doors by an unexpected exercise of my latent strength of character, and then how strange!”

One of the people of the same story who becomes a prominent actor in it, Henry Gowan, a creation on which he prided himself as forcible and new, seems to have risen to his mind in this way. “I affect to believe that I would do anything myself for a ten-pound note, and that anybody else would. I affect to be always book-keeping in every man’s case, and posting up a little account of good and evil with every one. Thus the greatest rascal becomes ‘the dearest old fellow,’ and there is much less difference than you would be inclined to suppose between an honest man and a scoundrel. While I affect to be finding good in most men, I am in reality decrying it where it really is, and setting it up where it is not. Might not a presentation of this far from uncommon class of character, if I could put it strongly enough, be likely to lead some men to reflect, and change a little? I think it has never been done.”

In
Little Dorrit
also will be found a picture which seems to live with a more touching effect in his first pleasing fancy of it. “The ferryman on a peaceful river, who has been there from youth, who lives, who grows old, who does well, who does ill, who changes, who dies — the river runs six hours up and six hours down, the current sets off that point, the same allowance must be made for the drifting of the boat, the same tune is always played by the rippling water against the prow.”

Here was an entry made when the thought occurred to him of the close of old Dorrit’s life. “First sign of the father failing and breaking down. Cancels long interval. Begins to talk about the turnkey who first called him the Father of the Marshalsea — as if he were still living. ‘Tell Bob I want to speak to him. See if he is on the Lock, my dear.’“ And here was the first notion of Clennam’s reverse of fortune. “His falling into difficulty, and himself imprisoned in the Marshalsea. Then she, out of all her wealth and changed station, comes back in her old dress, and devotes herself in the old way.”

He seems to have designed, for the sketches of society in the same tale, a “Full-length portrait of his lordship, surrounded by worshippers;” of which, beside that brief memorandum, only his first draft of the general outline was worked at. “Sensible men enough, agreeable men enough, independent men enough in a certain way; — but the moment they begin to circle round my lord, and to shine with a borrowed light from his lordship, heaven and earth how mean and subservient! What a competition and outbidding of each other in servility.”

The last of the Memoranda hints which were used in the story whose difficulties at its opening seem first to have suggested them, ran thus: “The unwieldy ship taken in tow by the snorting little steam tug” — by which was prefigured the patriarch Casby and his agent Panks.

In a few lines are the germ of the tale called
Hunted Down:
“Devoted to the Destruction of a man. Revenge built up on love. The secretary in the Wainewright case, who had fallen in love (or supposed he had) with the murdered girl.” — The hint on which he worked in his description of the villain of that story, is also in the Memoranda. “The man with his hair parted straight up the front of his head, like an aggravating gravel-walk. Always presenting it to you. ‘Up here, if you please. Neither to the right nor left. Take me exactly in this direction. Straight up here. Come off the grass — ’“

His first intention as to the
Tale of Two Cities
was to write it upon a plan proposed in this manuscript book. “How as to a story in two periods — with a lapse of time between, like a French Drama? Titles for such a notion. Time! The Leaves of the Forest. Scattered Leaves. The Great Wheel. Round and Round. Old Leaves. Long Ago. Far Apart. Fallen Leaves. Five and Twenty Years. Years and Years. Rolling Years. Day after Day. Felled Trees. Memory Carton. Rolling Stones. Two Generations.” That special title of
Memory Carton
shows that what led to the greatest success of the book as written was always in his mind; and another of the memoranda is this rough hint of the character itself. “The drunken? — dissipated? — What? — Lion — and his Jackall and Primer, stealing down to him at unwonted hours.”

The studies of Silas Wegg and his patron as they exist in
Our Mutual Friend
, are hardly such good comedy as in the form which the first notion of them seems to have intended. “Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. The two characters. One reporting to the other as he reads. Both getting confused as to whether it is not all going on now.” In the same story may be traced, more or less clearly, other fancies which had found their first expression in the Memoranda. A touch for Bella Wilfer is here. “Buying poor shabby — father? — a new hat. So incongruous that it makes him like African King Boy, or King George; who is usually full dressed when he has nothing upon him but a cocked hat or a waistcoat.” Here undoubtedly is the voice of Podsnap. “I stand by my friends and acquaintances; — not for their sakes, but because they are
my
friends and acquaintances.
I
know them,
I
have licensed them, they have taken out
my
certificate. Ergo, I champion them as myself.” To the same redoubtable person another trait clearly belongs. “And by denying a thing, supposes that he altogether puts it out of existence.” A third very perfectly expresses the boy, ready for mischief, who does all the work there is to be done in Eugene Wrayburn’s place of business. “The office boy for ever looking out of window, who never has anything to do.”

The poor wayward purposeless good-hearted master of the boy, Eugene himself, is as evidently in this: “If they were great things, I, the untrustworthy man in little things, would do them earnestly — But O No, I wouldn’t!” What follows has a more direct reference; being indeed almost literally copied in the story. “As to the question whether I, Eugene, lying ill and sick even unto death, may be consoled by the representation that coming through this illness, I shall begin a new life, and have energy and purpose and all I have yet wanted: ‘I
hope
I should, but I
know
I shouldn’t. Let me die, my dear.’“

In connection with the same book, the last in that form which he lived to complete, another fancy may be copied from which, though not otherwise worked out in the tale, the relation of Lizzie Hexam to her brother was taken. “A man, and his wife — or daughter — or niece. The man, a reprobate and ruffian; the woman (or girl) with good in her, and with compunctions. He believes nothing, and defies everything; yet has suspicions always, that she is ‘praying against’ his evil schemes, and making them go wrong. He is very much opposed to this, and is always angrily harping on it. ‘If she
must
pray, why can’t she pray in their favour, instead of going against ‘em? She’s always ruining me — she always is — and calls that, Duty! There’s a religious person! Calls it Duty to fly in my face! Calls it Duty to go sneaking against me!’“

Other fancies preserved in his Memoranda were left wholly unemployed, receiving from him no more permanent form of any kind than that which they have in this touching record; and what most people would probably think the most attractive and original of all the thoughts he had thus set down for future use, are those that were never used.

Here were his first rough notes for the opening of a story. “Beginning with the breaking up of a large party of guests at a country house: house left lonely with the shrunken family in it: guests spoken of, and introduced to the reader that way. — Or, beginning with a house abandoned by a family fallen into reduced circumstances. Their old furniture there, and numberless tokens of their old comforts. Inscriptions under the bells downstairs — ’Mr. John’s Room,’ ‘Miss Caroline’s Room.’ Great gardens trimly kept to attract a tenant: but no one in them. A landscape without figures. Billiard room: table covered up, like a body. Great stables without horses, and great coach-houses without carriages. Grass growing in the chinks of the stone-paving, this bright cold winter day.
Downhills.
” Another opening had also suggested itself to him. “Open a story by bringing two strongly contrasted places and strongly contrasted sets of people, into the connexion necessary for the story, by means of an electric message. Describe the message —
be
the message — flashing along through space, over the earth, and under the sea.”
Connected with which in some way would seem to be this other notion, following it in the Memoranda. “Representing London — or Paris, or any other great place — in the new light of being actually unknown to all the people in the story, and only taking the colour of their fears and fancies and opinions. So getting a new aspect, and being unlike itself. An
odd
unlikeness of itself.”

The subjects for stories are various, and some are striking. There was one he clung to much, and thought of frequently as in a special degree available for a series of papers in his periodical; but when he came to close quarters with it the difficulties were found to be too great. “English landscape. The beautiful prospect, trim fields, clipped hedges, everything so neat and orderly — gardens, houses, roads. Where are the people who do all this? There must be a great many of them, to do it. Where are they all? And are
they
, too, so well kept and so fair to see? Suppose the foregoing to be wrought out by an Englishman: say, from China: who knows nothing about his native country.” To which may be added a fancy that savours of the same mood of discontent, political and social. “How do I know that I, a man, am to learn from insects — unless it is to learn how little my littlenesses are? All that botheration in the hive about the queen bee, may be, in little, me and the court circular.”